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Friday, September 17, 2010

"Several of my friends have pointed out that my more recent and more personal material like "Call Me Your Man" or "Tara" sounds much less like a character than the songs that make up our first record Brooklyn Hustle/Memphis Muscle. Re-watching the videos of Jump Back Jake on the Ardent sessions I can see so clearly who this character was.

Though only a couple of years ago, I looked and sounded so different than I do today. If I was playing a character, it wasn't simply a mask I wore for performances or recording, but a person I inhabited. I think I was trying to become a Memphian—perhaps an impossible task for a New York City born yankee like myself, but I did try.

I lived in a house with a huge back yard where I would throw massive barbecue parties on July 4th and Labor Day that usually involved slow cooking a pork shoulder on an oil drum barbecue smoker. I had a hound dog named Jim that I would walk around the neighborhood every day after finishing a shift at my job cleaning houses.

The day we recorded the Ardent Sessions was my 27th birthday and Jump Back Jake was a road weary soul band (we'd just come back from gigs in Shreveport and Little Rock) with a full horn section and a B3 organ player. This is one of the better documents of that moment in time before our music and lives changed.

Six months later, I would hit the road indefinitely with Francis and the Lights, returning home whenever possible to rehearse and record new material with the JBJ. The music borne out of that moment makes up the songs on our new EP, and there aren't any horns or keyboards on it. Just the four of us banging it out in Studio A with the knowledge that the next day I'd be on a plane not knowing when we'd all get together to play again.

But the idea to record live in that room with no isolation at all only doing a couple of takes was borne out of the experience I had listening back to our Ardent Sessions. I was on the road somewhere listening to a captured moment of what Jump Back Jake sounded like in November of 2008 and using it to construct a vision of what we might sound like in the future. Now we can listen to both recordings and figure out where to go next."—"Jump Back" Jake Rabinbach 9-12-2010

Enter to win Jump Back Jake's debut LP "Brooklyn Hustle / Memphis Muscle" on vinyl by simply leaving a comment, your name, and a contact email address in the comments to this post. We'll choose one winner each Friday for that week's giveaway which ALSO includes the entire Ardent Music catalog. (That's just 2 artists at this point, but hey, who's counting?)